My elderly neighbour said something to me that has haunted me for the past two years.
She said, “I am old. I could die soon. When? Two or three years? Even so, I would give up two years of my life to spend one afternoon with my mum and dad.”
She’s 82 years old. Her name is Bianca. She’s from the small town of Asolo in northern Italy. We live in the same block of apartments and Bianca consistently takes out my rubbish bins every week while in return I keep her supplied with homemade jams and marmalades. It’s an uneven exchange that I have tried to rebalance but it’s been this way for the past two years.
Any time I feel as though I’m being a bad or ungrateful daughter to my own mother, I consider Bianca, who’d give up years just to spend an afternoon with hers. It’s the reminder I need to consider time with my own mum precious.
I thought Bianca wanted to see her mother and father to get to be a little girl again. To be dependent, to be held in softness, to have permission to be playful and silly and maybe a little helpless. But I was wrong. I didn’t figure it out until I went back to Bianca and interrogated the idea.
“What would you say to them?” I asked this week. “If you were to go and spend the afternoon with your parents?”
“Even to see them one week!” she said. “I would give what remains of my life to spend one week with them. To tell my story. To tell about my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren. To show them I’m proud of my family and that I created four human beings.”
Bianca wants to reassure her parents that she is safe, made the right choices and has done well in life. She wants to – and I am drawing my own conclusions now – let them off the hook. Their caring work is complete. They can rest. She has proof. She has her wonderful adult children, her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren. She has safety and security.
“The mother and father are responsible for the children,” she says. “We make them!
“For a better life, I chose to leave them [my parents]. I didn’t go because they don’t love me or I wanted to be independent. I went for love.
“So many times when I go to bed I kiss their photo. I say, ‘I wish you were here. Even for just one day.’”
It reminds me of the “wind phone” in Japan: a disused phone booth in a grassy field that became a source of comfort for people who had lost loved ones, particularly in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima tsunami. Many would come from far away to speak into the telephone to their dead family members. What stands out in the stories and recordings from the wind phone is that the conversations are mundane. “Your brother got a promotion.” “Your niece did well at school.” “We ate that chicken you like.” And, of course, “We miss you. I miss you.”
Bianca has experienced tragedy. She cried for two years when her infant son died. “But that is not my big regret,” she says. “We did everything we could for him. My big regret is something else: my mother had four kids. A couple of hours before she died she couldn’t talk but she made a gesture with her hands – four, but one missing, so only three. She meant me. I couldn’t be there.”
My mother Yoshiko’s story is similar to Bianca’s. She was also a migrant to Australia who moved here for love, facing language and cultural barriers, and having to leave those she cared about on the other side of the world.
“My mother was very ill when I decided to marry your father and leave Japan to settle in Australia,” Yoshiko says. Her older sister and brother were looking after my grandmother, Chiyo, at that time. Teiko, my aunty, asked Yoshiko not to go away and instead stay home and help them look after Chiyo. “Despite their request, I went ahead with my decision and left Japan, though feeling very guilty. I thought then that if I stayed with my mother I would be there for ever.”
The tradition in Japan is that you were looked after by your parents in childhood, so when your parents need support in turn you are obliged to give it.
I ask my mum if she thinks about death. This is a touchy subject because she is cool about most things but decidedly uncool about talking about her own funeral arrangements or what will happen when she starts to lose her marbles or her mobility.
“I am comfortable to believe there is no life after death,” she tells me. “Just disappear in the mist … truly. So despite being brought up in the Buddhist family I am not religious. I follow my own sense of good and bad.”
Bianca is less chill. “I am just scared to leave my people,” she says. “Now I understand that I am of the age. It is not tragic. When you die young, that is tragic. Everybody is supposed to live to 80. In January I’m 83.”
I asked my own mother about whether she would want to talk to her own parents if she could, and what would she say to them?
“If I could call my mother up on the phone, I would tell her, ‘Look what I have done … raised four kids and they are all doing very well, you should be very proud of me!’” Yoshiko says.
Bianca says: “I lost my mother 43 years ago. But for me it seems like she never died. Every night I kiss her [photo]. And again in the morning. For all my dead people I do that. I know she’s dead. But she’s every day in my mind. I don’t think one day passes without her in my mind, and my dad, and my baby.”
• Yumi Stynes is an Australian TV and radio presenter, podcaster and writer
